Hi! My name is Zsofi Valyi-Nagy (she/her) and I’m an artist, writer, and art historian currently based in Los Angeles. Welcome to my newsletter, High Functioning, which may appear in your inbox erratically, as it’s produced on crip time.

High Functioning began as a collaborative zine project with my dear friend Emily Friedman, who I met in Paris in 2021. We bonded over this label that doctors had stamped on our medical records–– “high functioning.” We were sick, but not quite sick enough to be taken seriously as patients. It was a strange grey area, both a blessing and a curse.

We wanted to create a space to process our experiences with chronic pain and illness through art and humor. I started making a comic about my misadventures in seeking out a diagnosis and released the first few panels as a digital zine in 2023. These same pages are reproduced here as free posts. There are many, many more comics where this came from, and this newsletter is an experiment in sharing them in a different format.

In addition to my comics, I will share some experimental writing and other creative works in progress on the topics of chronic illness, disability, crip time, and crip tech. I’d also love to invite other folks to do guest posts. If you’re here because you follow my writing on early digital and generative art, I must warn you that this is not the primary topic of this newsletter, though I’m sure there will be some thematic overlap.

A longer term goal of this project is to release the comics as a physical object, once I have some funding for the production costs (which your subscription to the newsletter will help make a reality). Thanks for your patience, and for reading and supporting! If you prefer a one-time donation to a recurring subscription, you can buy me a matcha here :)